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Gallian Snipers

While a Sniper possesses huge potential against enemy infantry targets over very long distances they have some of the lowest action points, hit points and defense of all units available to the player and therefore steps must be taken to protect them from enemy action on the battlefield.

While Snipers can evade enemy fire, they cannot intercept enemy combatants, counter attack or join cooperative assaults launched by adjacent allied units; they can, however, be the ones to initiate a team attack with scouts, shocktroopers, engineers, or tanks, though their fragility usually makes this impractical due to the tiny range of shocktrooper and tank machine guns. Lacking explosive weapons, they are also relatively ill-equipped to take on enemies in cover.

Valkyria Chronicles

The Sniper class requires a heavy investment of Experience points before they really come into their own; at low levels, use of a Sniper will generally require the player to save beforehand, since their combination of long range, reliance on headshots and low basic accuracy makes scoring a hit more a matter of luck than skill.

At higher levels they become an extremely effective means of removing troublesome individual units from the battlefield, particularly enemy Leaders, Lancers and other Snipers. Snipers are relatively poor at eliminating enemy Aces due to their high evasion, unless the player first "turns" the Ace by attacking him with a different unit to make him face away from the Sniper.

The only way to compensate for this low evasion is with the "No-zoom" bug; if snipers don't zoom at all when firing at an enemy, their target can't evade.[1]. However, only Marina Wulfstan, with a permanent accuracy boost via her potential Ultimate Accuracy, is reliably accurate enough to take advantage of this; none of the other snipers' accuracy-boosting potentials activate reliably enough to take advantage of this bug. This in itself is a late-game tactic, since Ultimate Accuracy is only unlocked once snipers are classed up to level 16.

Enemy Ace sniper rifles in the main game typically sacrifice range and accuracy for power and zoom levels; this is seldom a useful compromise, since a Sniper should be aiming for headshots anyway and their fragility makes them vulnerable at close range. The DLC missions include two Aces with unique sniper rifles, the ATR-01 and ATR-03. These give the sniper enhanced anti-tank ability at the cost of accuracy, range and anti-infantry capability; they're incredibly useful in the Upper Fouzen Expert Skirmish, as they're capable of sniping the Medium Tank + from a distance.

Valkyria Chronicles 3

Snipers return in Valkyria Chronicles 3 as their own independent class, first available after purchasing the GSR-1 sniper rifle from R&D at the start of Chapter 4.

Snipers level up to "elite" as in Valkyria Chronicles 1/4, though not through experience points, but rather through a background "level" specific to each unit that increases every time that unit rescues a downed ally, kills an enemy unit, or capture an enemy base. Unlike VC2, this means that players don't need to rely on random chance to obtain the credits necessary to reclass units into more powerful forms.

Snipers in this generation become far more versatile, able to wield either single-shot rifles and 3-shot auto-sniper rifles the moment they become available. Once a unit is leveled up to Sniper Veterans and Sniper Elites, Snipers can be rearmed with anti-tank rifles, replacing the AT Snipers of Valkyria Chronicles 2. For all intents and purposes, these Veteran and Elite Snipers are identical to regular Snipers except for their increased stats and AT-Rifles. They do lose the ability to ragnaid, which can either hurt or help players depending on one's playstyle.

Valkyria Chronicles 4

Snipers once again are their own independent class, with Kai Schulen being the first canon Sniper leader (excluding snipers that can be optionally designated leaders).

Unlike their predecessors, Snipers can finally inflict Interception Fire as Sniper Elites from Level 11. This can be problematic for both sides as their range is almost the same as that of the Grenadiers but have more accuracy drop-off than attacking directly.

Imperial Snipers

An imperial sniper

Imperial Snipers were sharpshooters attached to various Autocratic East Europan Imperial Alliance infantry units during the Second Europan War.

They were deployed during battles in order to neutralize enemy officers, as well as regular infantry if the opportunity presented itself. According to the ingame lore, using the ZM SG manual action rifle helped Imperial snipers achieve a higher rate of accuracy than most soldiers during the war. Ingame, however, looted ZM-SG rifles are incredibly inaccurate and short-ranged compared to Gallian sniper rifles though they have superior zoom magnification compared to their equivalent Gallian counterpart.

Valkyria Chronicles 4 snipers work in the same way as any other sniper of the series but sticking only to basic sniper without sub-classes and only leveling up to elite status, and paragon once unlocked, without new equipment but new abilities, like counter-fire (No ammo used), coop attack (Using ammo) and interception fire (With no ammo used). Unfortunately, they're horribly inaccurate without investing a good deal of experience points into them, much like their Gallian counterparts in Valkyria Chronicles 1.

Their line of sniper rifles also varies from past games with only a handful of reward rifles giving the Evasion Down debuff, while their tech tree focuses on Accuracy, General boost, and Capable of firing 3 bullets.

References

↑This is fully confirmed only in the Gallian Crossfire mod, thanks to Dainegai. Further testing in Vanilla Valkyria Chronicles will be carried out and referenced from youtube - LuckyFlanker13

Trivia

Regardless of game, enemy snipers may miss, however is this is more noticeable in VCII and really noticeable with auto snipers in VCIII.